CI Higher Education Blog

CI Higher Education Blog provides our clients with current and upcoming digital trends, news, and insights across higher education on a variety of digital topics including social media, development apps, campaigns, user experience best practices and other hot-button educational issues.

To celebrate the newest members of the Ohio State University’s alumni association, the university launched BuckeyeBuilder, a tool that allows recent grads to personalize their own buckeye avatars while also mining information about their post-grad plans. This provides another avenue for the alumni association to stay in touch with young alums.

Buckeye Builder Homepage

After inputting their university email, college, degree and post-graduate location, users can customize their avatar with five features: right arm, lips, facial hair, shoes and glasses.

Buckeye Builder Dashboard (Truncated)

Upon completion, the tool provides links to download the avatar or to share it on Facebook or Twitter. While the avatar does include the alumni association’s #BuckeyeForLife hashtag to remind users to promote the program on social media, the tool lacks any links to donate or to learn more about the alumni association itself.

As schools welcome recent graduates into their alumni associations, they should consider Ohio State’s avatar tool as a creative method to gain information about graduate’s plans while allowing them to showcase school spirit on social media.